{"id":394,"date":"2016-11-03T17:31:59","date_gmt":"2016-11-03T17:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/?p=394"},"modified":"2016-11-03T17:31:59","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T17:31:59","slug":"the-hot-pepper-horror-or-the-day-youtube-tried-to-kill-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/archives\/394","title":{"rendered":"The Hot Pepper Horror (or: The Day YouTube Tried to Kill Me)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I saw a basket of peppers at the market\u2014pretty little red things with green stems. I asked the vendor if they were hot. His response: \u201cJust a little hot. They\u2019re bird peppers.\u201d So I bought a pound of Just a Little Hot Bird Peppers. When I got home, I went online looking for some way to preserve them.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s when YouTube tried to kill me. <\/p>\n

It showed me a happy man chopping up what looked like bird peppers, simmering them in olive oil and salt until they were caramelized, then shoveling them into his mouth like candy.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what the video didn\u2019t<\/em> mention:
\n*To chop up bird peppers, you need a hazmat suit<\/strong>
\nTurns out bird peppers are also called cayenne chile peppers.<\/p>\n

\"file0001059354455\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They rank 50,000 on the Scoville heat scale. By comparison, jalape\u00f1os are a wussy 5,000 on the Scoville scale. By the time I\u2019d chopped up the whole pound of cayennes, my hands were burning, my eyes were burning, and my face felt like someone was poking it with needles.<\/p>\n

*When cayennes are cooked in oil, they release Death Vapors<\/strong>
\nCayenne Death Vapors will make you cough uncontrollably, they\u2019ll make you wheeze, they\u2019ll make your skin itch and your scalp sweat. I opened all the windows and turned on the fume hood. It didn\u2019t help. No one<\/em> would come into the kitchen\u2014not even the cats.<\/p>\n

*Cayennes get very angry<\/em> when you caramelize them<\/strong>
\nI was using a brand-new stainless steal frying pan that day. The cayennes destroyed the pan\u2019s surface, leaving it dull and pitted. After the peppers had cooled, I put them into plastic storage containers. They destroyed those, too, leaving puddles of cayenne oil spreading across the bottom of the fridge.<\/p>\n

*Cayennes can be lethal<\/strong>
\nI\u2019m pretty sure the guy in the YouTube video wasn\u2019t eating actual cayenne peppers. Because when he stuck one in his mouth, he was still able to talk\u2014and to rave about how delicious they were. When I ate one, my lungs stopped working\u2014no matter how hard I tried, I could not inhale<\/em> until I\u2019d actually swallowed the thing. And the flavor? Pain. It tasted like pain.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still willing to caramelize peppers again. But next time, I\u2019ll try something milder\u2014like jalape\u00f1os. And I\u2019ll get a hazmat suit.<\/p>\n

Did you enjoy this post?<\/strong> Please share on Facebook or Twitter so I can get the word out. And I hope you\u2019ll subscribe to my blog. It\u2019s easy: Just enter your email address in the upper right corner of this page. I\u2019ll never sell, share, or rent your contact information, because I hate it when people do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I saw a basket of peppers at the market\u2014pretty little red things with green stems. I asked the vendor if they were hot. His response: \u201cJust a little hot. They\u2019re bird peppers.\u201d So I bought a pound of Just a Little Hot Bird Peppers. When I got home, I went online […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":395,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}